


Like There's No Tomorrow

by CorpseBrigadier



Category: Final Fantasy Tactics
Genre: Bittersweet, Canonical Character Death, M/M, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-24 15:46:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21820411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorpseBrigadier/pseuds/CorpseBrigadier
Summary: Delita comes to see one heretic die and encounters another he did not expect to see living.
Relationships: Ramza Beoulve/Delita Heiral
Comments: 6
Kudos: 18
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Like There's No Tomorrow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rethira](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rethira/gifts).



> Title courtesy of Freddie Mercury as God and Yasumi Mastuno surely intended.

The sky over Mullonde was a pale, sickly yellow, which only threw into greater contrast the plume of dark smoke that stained it. Delita tried not to dwell on the spectacle that had brought him here, even though he had watched throughout, his eyes unwaveringly locked with Orran’s until the flames broke their connected gaze. His entourage marched in silence back into the alabaster walled city of saints. He would leave for Zeltennia tomorrow.

There had been no requirement, of course, that he watch. The newly elected High Confessor was in no position to command the presence of kings, for all that this had been a clear bid to reestablish the power of the Church. The holy throne once more had an occupant, however, and it was in his best interests to emphasize that his usurpation of station stopped firmly where God was concerned. A meager king could purge the six duchies and the senate as he liked; Delita wished to make it clear that heretics and holy men, however, were beyond his jurisdiction.   
  
He rode a gaudy, gold feathered bird, bred for show rather than practicality. As its claws clattered on the setts of the city streets, he wished very much that he could disappear unseen into the crowds of clustering laymen. He was very aware that he stood in the shadow of the papal palace, and he balked at being a cause for spectacle when he was—for once—not in power.

When he reached the apartments provided them, he lost no time in retreating to his room, sending a messenger to go arrange that a local priory might be paid for a year’s worth of prayers on the dead astrologer’s behalf. Alone for what seemed the first time since he’d left Gariland, he breathed deep and collapsed onto the chamber’s bed. 

It was over. Unless the witch still lived somewhere, he had been severed now from every human being that tied him to the past. He looked up at the ceiling, eyes tracing the vining tile work that wove itself into the repeating image of the stylized Golgorand gallows. 

Orran had composed himself with the stubbornness of a martyr, and he was feeling pensive and egotistical enough to imagine it had all been to spite him. If the Inquisition spoke true and his writings had been likewise treated to the purgation of fire, Delita would have to persist with nothing left of the man but his final silence: a refusal to give him any portion of what he knew and had learned in these five wearying years.

He turned his head to the color drained sky outside his window, wondering how far across the sea it was to the shores of Gallione.

* * *

He did not think, at first, that he slept. He had fallen into one of those stuporous instants of half sleep in which one remains alert to the world while being unaware it is receding. The sounds and sights of the room in which he lay still penetrated his senses, even as he came to witness images and occurrences that could not accompany them. He sat lazily entangled in the branches of a mulberry tree, staring into the harsh summer sun that came before the plague. He walked in a courtyard that seemed ensconced both in the dark towers of Zeltennia and in the white parapets of Eagrose. He fell, flowers dribbling from his hands, in the midst of a snow swept ruin.

As he drifted, he must have thought of Orran, for he imagined two eyes, bright as fire or polestars, staring at him from without the darkness. He wished what he dared not wish among noblemen or priests, and longed to ask questions—to beg that he be told of the heretic who escaped the stake and where in this lost and lonely world he might be. All other things he loved had wilted from him. He had long feared to interrogate the one man who claimed to have seen one of them still living, lest he dash what frail and phantasmal hope he had.

He wondered if men like Orran left ghosts—if he had floated into the autumn sky alongside his ashes and lived in whirling epicycles of the stars he studied. As he grew better aware of the heaviness of his limbs, he saw the shadow of some specter fall over him, blocking out the moonlight that streamed into his room.

He suddenly snapped into what seemed to be wakefulness, and saw a back lit figure sitting on the window ledge.

“Delita…”

He started, sober and alert. As he saw the shape and visage of what he had taken for a ghost, any impulse to assume an assassin and call for the guards died. He stood, his breath suspended as he tried to still his racing heart.

The last son of House Beoulve sat up, and gracelessly proved his corporeality by tripping on his way to the floor. Delita ran over to catch him, and found him just as material and alive as he had desperately desired him to be.

“What in the name of the Saint are you doing here?” he whispered in an almost accusatory tone. 

“There was a farewell I felt I owed somebody.” 

“So you traipsed into the Holy See... a wanted heretic who has just been a central topic in a fraught ecclesiastical trial, and you climbed into the bedchamber of a visiting king?”

He looked at him, warm with all the summers of the western plains as he smiled. His expression was only a little melancholy. Of course he had done something this extraordinary and foolish. Of course he was here.

“I felt I owed you a farewell too when I saw you,” he said quietly. “My brother is buried here as well, I think, for what it’s worth.”

“Ramza...” 

Delita stopped short as he embraced him very suddenly, clutching him tight enough that he could not see how near to weeping he was. He closed his eyes and breathed in the scent of his skin, remembering all those lost days in the orchards and streams within the demesnes of the white lion. The thought of them—of the ignorance of boyhood and of two youths lying in the tangle of one another’s tanned limbs—all so intangibly distant despite the tangible proof being suddenly in his arms.

“I missed you, Delita,” Ramza sounded as overwrought as he felt.

They did not talk at length. There was neither time nor desire for the accusations Delita felt he deserved—no mention of the queen or the war or even the man they had both come to see burned. For that brief bubble of time, it was as though they were in Gallione again, and as Ramza pressed his lips against his, Delita achingly, hopelessly imagined that the moment might somehow persist: that against all reason and logic, he might stay. He gripped Ramza hard, pressing him deep into the down of the bed, and he swore as they fell together that outside the world had suddenly blazed back into sunlight.

* * *

When morning finally did come, he was alone and without any memento of a visitation. As the graying dawn came upon him, he immediately thought to the possibility that Ramza—had he been a real presence—may well have been subject to discovery and arrest by now. He mentally prepared himself for all the steps that would need to be taken in that eventuality: of how to address any evidence of a meeting and how to best to compose a statement regarding a criminal for whom there could not possibly be clemency. He did not linger upon the bed or within the room. He knew that there was nothing there now.

Delita felt the numbing weight of his own pragmatism as the day wore on. There was no word of Ramza, much to his relief, but as he returned to the overcast world of courtiers and counsels, he became increasingly convinced that the night before was some phantasy—some fanciful nothing. For a man who had vanished so thoroughly from the world to drop back into it in such a sudden and improbable way—such things did not happen. There was no evidence or relic of the meeting; there was nothing but one man’s memory.

As the salt air of the dark sea washed over him, though, he played those memories again and again in his brain, trying to cut them there that they might tarry a little longer. He had them now, and that was enough. All things faded toward nothing anyway, he told himself, and neither necklaces nor grass nor flowers nor ashes remained in the end to leave their mark.

**Author's Note:**

> See my [profile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorpseBrigadier/profile) for notes on remixes, podfic, derivative works, and constructive criticism.


End file.
